Author Notes

He’s back and it’s about time... in the space of three words, the Doctor’s alive, and the tables have completely turned.

I wasn’t going to explain how the Doctor survived at first – who cares, now he’s back? But everyone that read the first draft wanted an explanation, so I put one in. Re-reading the book, you’ll see that the Doctor’s been very busy, working with Lex Christian and Eve (which is why we’ve not seen them, either).

When the Doctor confronts Xznaal, the description of him is an inversion of the first description of Xznaal back in chapter seven. He won’t admit it, but Xznaal’s scared.

The ‘gazing into the abyss’ quote is, of course, an inversion of the Nietzsche quote. Along with quoting from ‘Things Fall Apart’, it was the favourite quote of the New Adventures, popping up all over the place to encapsulate how the ‘dark’ seventh Doctor was becoming as much of a monster as his adversaries. The eighth Doctor is different – and he’s conquered the Red Death once, so it’s not going to frighten him now.

I wanted people to think that I’d brought the Doctor back to kill him, and that he would die falling out of the ship. It’s meant to evoke a Reichenbach Falls / Logopolis moment... but I don’t think it works – he’s such an irresistible force in this last chapter, that you don’t wonder if he’ll survive, you only wonder how he’ll manage to. In the end, I wanted to end the book with a memorable image – and, in those terms, it works. By quoting from Logopolis, I perhaps fooled people for ten seconds into thinking he was going to regenerate.